The Girl Who Fell From The Sky “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free” – Ralph Ellison. In Heidi Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, the main character Rachel tries to discover who she is in order to have the freedom to define herself. Rachel is a young biracial girl with beautiful blue eyes who is suddenly forced to move to Portland, Oregon and live with her strict African-American grandmother. Rachel was raised by her Caucasian mother to think of herself as white, but now she is in racially intolerant Portland and expected to “act black”. Rachel refuses to accept the narrow labels that people in Portland are using as adequate to describe who she really is – she rejects all of the descriptors as belonging to someone else, not her. As she grows up Rachel becomes convinced that she will never be free to define herself until she
…show more content…
Eventually, Rachel is able to remember what happened -- her mother pushed her siblings off the roof of a building and then jumped in to order to protect the family from being defined by the racial; labels imposed by others. By discovering how her mother dealt with racial injustice Rachel gains the freedom to define her own identity.
When Rachel arrives in Portland, she finds herself living in an African American community that openly discriminates against her because she is biracial. She deals with the racial taunts from the children at school by saying, “They have a language I don't know but I understand. I learn that black people don’t have blue eyes. I learn that I am black. I have blue eyes. I put these new facts into the new girl.”(10). The people in her new community try to define her according to the racial stereotypes they embrace, but Rachel refuses to accept their labels. She does not believe that her physical differences define who she is; she is aware that there is more to
Eventually, Rachel is able to remember what happened -- her mother pushed her siblings off the roof of a building and then jumped in to order to protect the family from being defined by the racial; labels imposed by others. By discovering how her mother dealt with racial injustice Rachel gains the freedom to define her own identity.
When Rachel arrives in Portland, she finds herself living in an African American community that openly discriminates against her because she is biracial. She deals with the racial taunts from the children at school by saying, “They have a language I don't know but I understand. I learn that black people don’t have blue eyes. I learn that I am black. I have blue eyes. I put these new facts into the new girl.”(10). The people in her new community try to define her according to the racial stereotypes they embrace, but Rachel refuses to accept their labels. She does not believe that her physical differences define who she is; she is aware that there is more to